Like most sound tenets of military art, the concepts of "objective" and "measures of effectiveness" have been corrupted by America’s present military leadership. At his Senate confirmation hearing in June 2009, then-Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal promised the Armed Services Committee he would execute a "holistic" strategy in Afghanistan, and that “the measure of effectiveness will …
Continue reading “Measures of Ineffectiveness”
In my 1950s childhood, Ripley’s Believe It or Not was part of everyday life, a syndicated comics page feature where you could stumble upon such mind-boggling facts as: “If all the Chinese in the world were to march four abreast past a given point, they would never finish passing though they marched forever and forever." …
Continue reading “US War-Fighting Numbers to Knock Your Socks Off”
Propaganda networks that conduct "psychological warfare" for the Pentagon have been in vogue for a long time. Mike Furlong, a senior Pentagon official who is now being investigated for running a covert network of contractors to supply information for drone strikes and assassinations in Afghanistan and Pakistan, had a long history of working in this …
Continue reading “The Pentagon’s Propaganda Networks”
William Astore has some questions for the Pentagon
A report [.pdf] and budget request from the U.S. Defense Department released Monday reveal both new and old priorities for President Barack Obama’s Pentagon. Strategically, the military recognizes new, non-traditional threats ranging from failed states to cyber-warfare to climate change. But there is little change in the military spending habits of the Obama Pentagon versus …
Continue reading “New Defense Strategy Envisions Multiple Conflicts”
President Obama has presented Congress with a spending request of $3.8 trillion for the next fiscal year in 2011, but with a third of it not paid for with taxes, thus resulting in a $1.3 trillion deficit (a whopping 8.3 percent of GDP). The small piece of good news is that this deficit is smaller …
Continue reading “The US Can No Longer Afford Its Empire”
This isn’t "defense." The new budget from the White House will push U.S. military spending well above $2 billion a day. Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it. "Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for …
Continue reading “Don’t Call It a ‘Defense’ Budget”
Back in 2007, when Gen. David Petraeus was the surge commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, he had a penchant for clock imagery. In an interview in April of that year, he typically said: “I’m conscious of a couple of things. One is that the Washington clock is moving more rapidly than the Baghdad clock, …
Continue reading “Our Wars Are Killing Us”
Jeff Huber on the Pentagon’s public affairs zombies
There’s something viral about the wondrous new weaponry an industrial war system churns out. In World War I, for instance, when that system was first gearing up to plan and produce new weapons by the generation, such creations – poison gas, the early airplane, the tank – barely hit the battlefield before the enemy had …
Continue reading “The Forty-Year Drone War” 
